Complex tasks such as Investigative Analysis & Business Intelligence gathering often require searching electronic data sources (such as databases, the WWW—World Wide Web a global computer network, or other data repositories) and analyzing the results returned by the search. In many cases, these searches are not just simple transient queries that search a data source, return results, and are finished; rather, the searches consist of persistent queries that continually monitor one or more data sources and return a stream of results. They may be high-level semantic inquiries, such as “Monitor all calls made by customers to a customer service representative” or “Monitor all news articles on Company ABC and new product advertising.”
How to manage these persistent queries, and the results they return, is both an organizational and attention-management problem. In the course of one's problem-solving work, how does one organize and manage persistent queries and results in such a way that one will notice relevant results in a timely manner? In terms of organization, some current alert systems provide a web page for setting up and managing queries, and then email results to a user with a certain frequency (for example, Google Alerts at www.google.com/alerts, emails updates of the latest relevant Google results on a particular topic to a user at a chosen interval, e.g. once a day or as they happen). RSS feeds provide another mechanism to manage persistent queries: A user subscribes to information sources of interest, and an RSS reader checks the subscribed feeds at intervals for new content. Other current solutions provide support for setting up an organizational framework (such as hierarchical “themes”) for classifying results (e.g. IBM's COBRA system, at cobrademo.almaden.ibm.com/cobraTesco/). In terms of drawing a user's attention to relevant results, these systems take varying approaches. Some (e.g. Google Alerts) merely email results to the user with a specified frequency. With RSS feeds, the user must check for new information by accessing the RSS reader whenever desired. Similarly, with classified alert systems such as COBRA, the user must check the system periodically to see how many new results have been collected for each “theme”.
There are two significant drawbacks of these existing systems as a means for managing persistent queries and results. The first is that the existing mechanisms fail to support contextual management of persistent queries and their results, i.e. queries are issued and results are accessed by mechanisms that are independent of the user's main work environment and work artifacts. For example, a user may be conducting an investigative analysis by modelling a particular problem, and wishes to issue persistent queries and monitor their results in real-time. Existing techniques (such as those mentioned above) require a user to manage the desired queries and results independent of the work application (whether a modelling application, word processing document or slide presentation, etc.). Rather than relying on the inherent structure of the problem, solution, or work artifacts, the user may need to create a separate organizational scheme to classify queries and collect results (e.g. COBRA).
A second drawback of the existing mechanisms is that the awareness of results is not very immediate or contextual. Since both email and RSS are polling-based technologies, users will at best only see the new results relating to their queries when they check their email or read their RSS feeds; since the technologies are not real-time, they don't offer a way to tell the user what is happening “right now” with regard to their queries. With specialized alerting systems (e.g. COBRA), users must also access the system in order to view new results. If users do not access these alerting systems often enough, they run the risk of missing important information when it gets created or changes. Moreover, the organization of results in each of these systems depends on the user explicitly setting up an organizational scheme (e.g. email or RSS folders, COBRA themes) for collecting alerts/results that best matches the work at hand, but this requires extra work and is separate from the structure of the work artifacts, problem, or solution.